Some STEM of STEAMS

How many times are we going to get the sand pillow in the hole? How many times are we going to be almost there?

TECHNOLOGY AND ENGINEERING .- How many times are we going to get the sand pillow in the hole? How many times are we going to be almost there? Well, in other words how accurate and precise are our shots? We can keep playing and writing down our points. Or we can just play thinking about: The peculiar concepts of Accuracy and Precision that are defined in terms of systematic and random errors. The more common definition associates accuracy with systematic errors and precision with random errors. Another definition, advanced by ISO, associates trueness with systematic errors and precision with random errors, and defines accuracy as the combination of both trueness and precision. In the fields of science, engineering and statistics, the accuracy of a measurement system is the degree of closeness of measurements of a quantity to that quantity’s true value. The precision of a measurement system, related to reproducibility and repeatability, is the degree to which repeated measurements under unchanged conditions show the same results. Although the two words precision and accuracy can be synonymous in colloquial use, they are deliberately contrasted in the context of the scientific method. The concepts of accuracy and precision have also been studied in the context of databases, information systems and their socio-technical context. The necessary extension of these two concepts on the basis of theory of science suggests that they (as well as data quality and information quality) should be centered on accuracy defined as the closeness to the true value seen as the degree of agreement of readings or of calculated values of one same conceived entity, measured or calculated by different methods, in the context of maximum possible disagreement. Click here

Space Maybe Digital. Look at the constellations, look at the bubbles!

SCIENCE AND MATH.- Yes, we can imaging tiny, tiny specks of energy, or while playing with bubbles we can wonder if the atom, or an energy particle, could vibrate and move in nature like the fragile bubbles appear and disappear in that awesome way. While looking at the images of stars and constellations we can interpret that energy has expanded in a way; we are just looking at the past. Can we only image the vastness outside Earth and think if Space Maybe is Digital? Craig Hogan believes that the world is fuzzy. This is not a metaphor. Hogan, a physicist at the University of Chicago and director of the Fermilab Particle Astrophysics Center near Batavia, Ill., thinks that if we were to peer down at the tiniest subdivisions of space and time, we would find a universe filled with an intrinsic jitter, the busy hum of static. This hum comes not from particles bouncing in and out of being or other kinds of quantum froth that physicists have argued about in the past. Rather Hogan’s noise would come about if space was not, as we have long assumed, smooth and continuous, a glassy backdrop to the dance of fields and particles. Hogan’s noise arises if space is made of chunks. Blocks. Bits. Hogan’s noise would imply that the universe is digital. Click here

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, and MATH. – Who are we? Where did we start? In this case, anthropologists

We have evolved for many years. We have changed over time. How are we going to be in 10 million years?

used Scientific Methods to study how old are some human-like bones found in the ground. They used Technology with their instruments to read some tests applied to the bones. They used Math to calculate how many years have passed since the bones were buried. Engineers were behind the scenes to develop all the equipment and instruments for the Scientists. The birth of our genus has long been a conundrum for paleoanthropologists, to say the least. Only a few scattered and fragmentary fossils older than two million years have been argued to belong to the genus. Then, around 1.8 million years ago, not one but two or possibly even three Homo species appear, mostly in East Africa. The smaller brained, more primitive ones are called Homo habilis, or “handy man,” a name given by Louis Leakey and colleagues in 1964 to specimens from Olduvai Gorge because of their association with the first crude stone tools. Some researchers group a few H. habilis specimens into a separate species,Homo rudolfensis. Then there is Homo erectus (the early African forms are sometimes called Homo ergaster)—larger brained, bigger bodied, more advanced, yet contemporaneous with little H. habilis.click here